The internet is a wonderful thing. Sometimes not so much, but I can say for certain that it has greatly improved my odds over the years as it pertains to actually being able to catch a fish in an unfamiliar territory. Email after email went out and came back with mixed response to my yank inquisition…
“Hey Yall! Where can I come and catch yalls’ purty fish?”
More often than not the response was more than amicable and many even offered to help in person, but one host in particular was so helpful that I fancied I might even have a chance at a nice angling vacation. Albie.
Albie is the secretary of a local angling club and he is also probably the one responsible for keeping me out of Scottish jail, or come to find out later, not having my rental repo’d which is common practice for those caught poaching. In my Americanized mind I thought I would be able to simply buy a license and trounce around the countryside fishing my little heart out…think again. All the water is owned and managed by clubs making it more than challenging to get the rights to fish. This is an especially painful procedure considering the entire country is chock full of the most gorgeous water I have ever personally laid eyes on. No matter, Albie had taken pity on me and offered his hand and his club's water as a primer in Scottish brown trout fishing. I was more than obliged to accept.
Fittingly with our misguided confidence in our left handed navigational abilities, we stroll on over to the town of STRATH-HAVEN, or we tried to at least. No one seemed to understand our Yank pronunciation of the town name although we were less than 5kms away from the damn place.
"Oi, where's Strathaven?"
"Strathaven? Never heard of it?"
"Just right here...(poining at the now tattered atlas"
“Oh you mean STRAVEN?! Yeah just up the road a bit.”
We were beginning to feel overwhelmed, but just then Albie reassured us that ‘twas a common mistake and the “TH” phonetics in Scotland were actually a “V”. Armed with our new found grammatical ammunition we set out for club water.